Germany has reacted angrily to an intervention by the Russian foreign minister into the case of a 13-year-old ethnic Russian girl who claimed to have been abducted and raped by foreign immigrants in Berlin.

The case has received huge attention in Russia, where television news reports claimed the girl was held as a “sex slave” by a group of migrants for more than 24 hours. But after an initial investigation, police said there was no evidence to suggest the girl had been abducted or raped.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, accused the authorities of trying to “hush up” what had really happened to the girl, known only as “Lisa”. At a press conference in Moscow on Tuesday, he said he hoped Germany was not trying to “paint over reality, out of political correctness”.................